I do not think the verdict is in yet, I asked if we would be able to upgrade from LMDE2 to LMDE3, but was told, it is to soon to tell. But I have never seen Mint do an auto upgrade. And to be honest, never seen that in the Linux world. But keep reading the Mint blogs as we should start to hear about LMDE3 sometime after Debian 9 Stretch is released.

LMDE being based on Debian stable, an upgrade path is more than likely. Since years, people are able to update from one Debian release to the other. There is no reason why it should be different next time.

I have Debian stretch stable with LMDE Betsy packages installed, it was a major pain switching from Jessie to Stretch. Fortunately, I sorted it all out by commenting out the LMDE repositories first and running aptitude update followed by aptitude. Using aptitude, I ripped out much of the LMDE Betsy MATE packages and then installed the stretch MATE packages to remove the conflicts when upgrading to a new major version after the freeze. After that, I added back the LMDE Betsy repositories and added some of the desired Mint packages for a Minty flavor. Alternatively, you could run aptitude safe-upgrade followed by aptitude dist-upgrade. It will not be a smooth process and a lot of packages can and will break though.

*Aptitude is a package manager I use exclusively. It's not very user friendly but for my use case it gets the job done.

Not much, unless you want a major headache. The sys-v init system has been changed, in that it no longers prints out whether a service has been started or stopped. Mint's version of MATE is much more polished compared to Stretch. Some kernel dev packages have been removed & marked as obsolete - like kernel-package & kernel-common, binutils-x86_64-gnu for cross-compiling... I managed to keep those anyway. If anything, if you're on Jessie, stick with it for now if you value stability. Might as well as wait for LMDE3 to come out when it's ready as I'm certain Clem & company will work to minimize the bugs so your upgrade will be much smoother compared to what I went thru.

Last edited by titetanium on Mon Jul 17, 2017 9:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

Don't need anymore headaches LOL. I honesty man not even go to LMDE3. LMDE2 is great on my laptop. I did switch to Cinnamon because MATE 18 screwed my system up. I'm glad I did .. Cinnamon is pretty nice IMHO